local vs overseas web hosting

Would anyone know the difference, If I were to build a site with med traffic would it be better going for the overseas hosting package?

Any good local and overseas hosting company's anyone has used?

Give us some more info... Latency is your biggest issue overseas, there are some pretty good hosting options in NZ and if you're looking for US$7/yr hosting forgeeeetaboutit

building a site for surfboard shaper so I guess traffic wont be as much as say a sales site.

Would it really matter for my purpose.?

Whats the norm for hosting fees?

check out:

www.net24.co.nz or www.digiweb.co.nz

for local hosts. Both are excellent to deal with.

I haven't used any local hosts, so can't comment there, but my websites are all hosted on Webhost4life

http://www.webhost4life.com/hosting.asp

These guys are flawless, and I have nothing but good things to say about their CS. They use IIS/Linux and are based in the states I think.

What's the target market? If most of the visitors are going to be Kiwis, it will be better to host the website on a NZ server for better latency. I run a local website myself that used to be hosted overseas. The difference in latency was huge and very noticable when I switched to a NZ based web hosting provider. The site I am running is mycash.co.nz, and is hosted for FREE by spacemonkey.co.nz.

"Unlimited traffic"

Golly, that could lead to epic fail.

I am sure some sort of a "fair use policy" applies, but I am not too concerned. I guess they could start having some problems if someone decides to run a video streaming site or something...

Doesn't take much.

Andrew can probably tell you how many gigs/month of international traffic exceptional.co.nz was doing a few years back and that was just a lame site with some pictures of chicks on it.

so I'm looking for recommendations on local hosting

what type of things do I need to think about when making enquiries?

Hosting platform (Windows or Linux, since it can effect potential future development beyond basic html pages)
Disk space
Bandwidth
Overage charges for both of those
SLA

Forget totally about email hosting or anything like that, Google Apps does it far better and for free. Just look for straight up web hosting.

sla = ???

also any recommendations on local hosting? my business and web traffic will be local so I don't expect any international traffic unless it is by accident

can you get google mail to use your domain name kris?

snowflake, I've got orcon to host a website, $12/month for 5mb space on linux.

Yes smiley, that's why I said Google Apps and not GMail. It's what half the planet has been doing for the last few years.

http://mail.breakbeat.co.nz for example.

AND IT'S FREE!

SLA = Service Level Agreement. Basically, what happens when they have technical issues, support etc.

Recommendation's?

I'm currently looking for basic hosting with support for php, locally of course.